The Sinatra Club: My Life Inside the New York Mafia

Summary

The Mob was the biggest, richest business in America—too dangerous and too deadly to fail. Until it was destroyed from within by drugs, greed, and the decline of its traditional crime Family values.

And by guys like Sal Polisi.

He was born in Brooklyn—the same place that spawned Murder, Inc., Al Capone, and John Gotti, the future Mob godfather who became his friend. Polisi was raised on a family legacy that led him into the life he loved as a member of the Colombos, one of the New York Mob’s feared Five Families, and came of age when the Mafia was at the height of its vast wealth and power.

Known by his Mob name, Sally Ubatz (“Crazy Sally”), he ran an illegal after-hours gambling den, The Sinatra Club, that was a magic kingdom of crime and a hangout for up-and-coming mobsters like Gotti and the three wiseguys immortalized in Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas—Henry Hill, Jimmy Burke, and Tommy DeSimone. For Polisi, the nonstop thrills of glory days spent robbing banks, hijacking trucks, pulling daring heists—and getting away with it all, thanks to cops and public servants corrupted by Mob money—were fleeting. When he was busted for drug trafficking, and already sickened by the bloodbath that engulfed the Mob as it teetered toward extinction, he flipped and became one of a breed he had loathed all his life—a rat.

In this riveting, pulse-pounding, and, at times, darkly hilarious first-person chronicle of his brazen crimes, wild sexual escapades, and personal tragedies, Polisi tells his story of life inside the New York Mob in a voice straight from the streets. With shocking candor, he draws on a hard-won knowledge of Mob history to paint a neverbefore- seen picture of the inner workings of the Mob and the larger-than-life characters who populated a once extensive and secret underworld that, thanks to guys like him, no longer exists.

***

I was always a street guy. I was into robbing and stealing and gambling and loan sharking. I wasn’t involved in the bigmoney sit-downs, the labor racketeering and construction company shakedowns, the Garment District and garbage and cement company kickbacks. . . . For guys like me and Fox, my blood brother and crime partner, the thing we loved about being in that life was the action, the excitement. . . .We were in it for the money, sure. But it was the danger, the thrills that made the life of crime something special.

A guy like John Gotti was different. He was far more ambitious than me and Fox. He wasn’t just in it for the rush and the riches. He wanted the power and the glory.

John Gotti’s tragedy, if you can call it that, was that he was born too late for the old-school gangster crown that he craved. He began his rise as the Mob was beginning to crumble; by the time he got to the top, the bottom had dropped out.

From the beginning, John was charismatic and smart. He just wasn’t cut out to be godfather. Once he became boss, he drove the bus right off the bridge. Or maybe it was the bus that drove him. Either way, I watched him go.

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The Sinatra Club - Sal Polisi

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Prologue

WE WERE AT A joint called the Fireplace in Ozone Park, Queens, when I first heard Johnny Boy’s name. It was the summer of 1968, not long after Bobby Kennedy got whacked. I knew better than to ask my boss, Dominic, who I was with that night and who was a hit man himself, about Bobby, but I assumed it was a Mob job like his brother. Nobody ever heard of any of the Families using an Arab button man, but crazier shit happened that year. Race riots, student riots, police riots, whole cities on fire, Chicago cops busting heads on TV—it looked like the whole country was going up in flames. Maybe that’s why it seemed like pyromaniacs named all the Mob joints we hung out in back then.

The Fireplace had a cage over the bar with a couple of go-go dancers shaking it to Steppenwolf’s Born to Be Wild and Good Lovin’ by the Rascals. They didn’t normally play hippie music in there, but the Rascals were Italians, and Born to Be Wild was a great song to crank up after a score.

Dom was busy telling a story about a guy in our crew named Big Funzi Tarricone. Funzi was with the Colombo Family, like us. Everybody called him Funzi because his name was Alphonse; they called him Big Funzi because what else can you call a guy who is six foot four? Funzi was a gorilla, but not exactly what you’d call a high-wattage kind of guy.

The year before, my uncle Tony and another friend of ours named Sonny were going away for bank robbery. Before Sonny went in, he sold one of his Cadillacs. Funzi gets a call and he’s told that Sonny’s got car trouble, Dom says. Funzi goes, ‘So find a mechanic.’ He’s not bein’ a smart-ass. He really thinks you got car trouble, get a mechanic. Turns out the dealership Sonny sold his car to did what dealers do: They turned around and sold it to somebody else. Trouble is the car salesman tells the new buyer to have the Caddy swept for bugs because it belonged to ‘a hoodlum named Sonny Franzese.’ No shit. He calls Sonny a hoodlum. The dumb prick doesn’t know that the buyer is connected. The buyer makes a call, and next thing, Big Funzi’s on his way to give the used-car salesman a talking-to. Funz was hanging out with a couple of Gambino guys from Fatico’s crew that day. So he takes these two bruisers with him—the Indian, Willie Boy, and this kid Johnny Boy, who thinks he’s Al Capone—he does his shylock work with a baseball bat. That fuckin’ salesman had to sell cars from a wheelchair after that.

A week later, Dom and I were at the Flame, another bar named in honor of the wiseguy’s favorite problem solver—arson. The Flame was a Gambino joint on the Brooklyn-Queens line, and some of that Family’s guys were in there. Dom pointed out one of them and said that’s the guy who’s got the swing like Capone, Johnny Boy. From where I stood at the bar, I couldn’t make out much about him except that he looked like a typical tough guy with linebacker shoulders and his hair swept up and back like a hood from the ’50s. The next I heard he was in the can on a federal rap for hijacking. After that, nothing; if his name came up, I didn’t notice. I didn’t give Johnny Boy a second thought.

In the summer of ’68 I was twenty-three and already a career criminal with an arrest record dating back to high school, but I was still a rookie outfielder with the Colombo Family. A few years would pass before I earned my Mob name, Sally Ubatz—Crazy Sally. Ubatz is Brooklynese for upazzo, crazy in Italian.

How I got it is a wild story I’ll get to later. But back then, if Dominic or anybody else told me that this guy Johnny Boy, a low-level Gambino with a Capone fixation, would one day not only become boss of that Family and the most powerful Mafia leader in the country but would also rewrite the history of the Mob and become world famous in the process, I would have thought they were the ones who were upazzo.

I would have known for sure if anybody had predicted that when Johnny Boy skyrocketed to power and flamed out in equally spectacular fashion, I would have a front-row seat and that he and I would be bound together in a personal drama, one that began the day he got out of prison in 1972 and didn’t end until thirty years later, when he was back in stir for life but where he met an early death instead.

I got to know John Gotti four years after that night at the Flame. That’s when he started hanging out at the Sinatra Club, the new gambling joint in Ozone Park I owned with the Cataldos, Dominic and his little brother Joey.

John and I spent a lot of time together because we both had a big-time jones for gambling. Even though he loved playing cards, he was a lousy poker player and he hardly ever hit a winner at the track—but he was great at board games. John and me and Foxy Jerothe—a young guy who’d been with John since he was a kid and who became my best friend and crime partner—used to spend hours playing at my club and at the Gambinos’ own place nearby, the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club. We played marathon games of Scrabble and Monopoly. We bet on those games, and John won a lot of them. He was pretty good at chess too. Once we got to know each other, Johnny and I hung out together outside my club and our other regular haunts. We went to the track, we went to ball games and barbeques, we played softball at his crew’s annual picnics. When our kids got older, they played on the same Pop Warner football teams.

Despite the fact that Johnny and I were with different Families, we planned scores together. That’s something that would never have happened in the old days, but thanks in part to the Sinatra Club, the strict lines between Mob Families were beginning to blur. The club was a place where guys from all the different Families hung out together regularly, another thing that the bosses never would have allowed just a few years earlier.

John and I talked a lot about the Mob and how it was in the old days and how things were changing. He grew up in the same neighborhood where I was born—in East New York, Brooklyn. That’s where John’s heroes Al Capone and Albert Anastasia were from and where the Murder Incorporated headquarters—Midnight Rose’s candy store—was. John loved all the stories about the Mob in those days, and I was full of them thanks to my uncle Tony. Uncle Tony was an old-school gangster who came up under Joe Profaci, and he raised me on his stories about what it was like running booze during Prohibition and how guys like Profaci and Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello and, before all of them, Arnold Rothstein, the guy who fixed the World Series, ruled New York and lived like kings.

John and I both grew up with the same dream to become part of that world my uncle Tony told me about when I was a kid. John was five years older than me and already a soldier in his Gambino capo Charlie Fatico’s crew. I was twenty-six by then and still trying to prove myself. But we both had the same goal—to join the brotherhood of hoodlums and become made members of our respective Mafia Families.

By any measure of the New York Mob’s wealth and power and popularity, it was at an all-time high when John Gotti and I became friends in 1972. That was a watershed year, when a new generation of Mob leaders began their ascendancy and the old structures that had been in place for decades began to crumble. It was a year of big changes, not the least of which was the public’s perception of the Mob’s might and influence. That happened in large part thanks to The Godfather, which was released that March. Every connected guy alive loved that movie because it turned us into romantic heroes. Women all over town wanted to bang a gangster once they saw it. My best friend, Fox Jerothe, and our hijacking partner Tommy DeSimone and I saw the picture together that spring. We left the theater so juiced up, we went out and committed a major felony in celebration of the Life we’d just seen played out on the big screen.

Most legitimate people had no idea how big and powerful the Mob really was until they saw that film or read the best-selling novel by Mario Puzo that it was based on. The year before the movie came out, another book—Gay Talese’s Honor Thy Father, about Joe Bananas, the boss of the Bonanno Family—laid out the true facts behind the fiction.

We’re bigger than U.S. Steel. That’s one of the lines everybody remembered from The Godfather. The guy who says it is the film’s Meyer Lansky character, Hyman Roth. Lansky was the Jewish gangster who was the brains behind Lucky Luciano, the Mafia’s capo di tutti capi in the old days. What Lansky actually said was—in a bugged conversation with his wife—We’re bigger than General Motors.

Truth was, the Mob was bigger than both those outfits put together, along with most of the rest of the Top Ten Fortune 500 at the time. According to Talese, the American Mafia—including twenty-four Families scattered around the country, with the five centered in New York City by far the richest and strongest—was raking in $40 billion a year by the early ’70s. That was more than the earnings of General Motors, U.S. Steel, Standard Oil, Chrysler, Ford, IBM, AT&T, RCA, and General Electric combined.

The Mob wasn’t just big business—it was the biggest business in America. And like its legit corporate cousins today, it operated with little or no government regulation and paid zero taxes.

The only fees the Mob paid on all its profit came in the form of payoffs to friends of the Families in high places and low. It took some hefty sums to grease all the politicians and government officials, judges, lawyers, prosecutors, police brass, investigators, detectives, and cops on the job who were also on the take.

But thanks to the greed and corruption of the same people taxpayers paid to serve and protect them, the Mafia’s enormous gang of criminals were able to commit the most brazen acts of thievery and violence imaginable—from back-alley serial killings to public executions, including the most blatant whacking of all time, the assassination of a president—and get rich in the process. The so-called good guys gave us the greatest gift any small-time hoodlum or Mafia don could ask for: They let us get away with it.

In 1972, no Mafia CEO reaped more of the rewards or presided over a larger empire and ruled it more ruthlessly than the man Johnny Boy Gotti would one day succeed.

If the movie’s producers had set out to portray the real godfather, they never would have cast Marlon Brando as Don Corleone. They would have found an obscure character actor nobody ever heard of to play Carlo Gambino, a short and unintimidating seventy-year-old man who looked like he couldn’t fight his way out of the old folks’ home.

Despite all his wealth and power, the Gambino Family father was modest and unassuming in every way. Unlike some of his predecessors who lived in lavish party palace penthouses overlooking Central Park and country estates that were like feudal manors, Gambino resided with his wife and kids in a tiny-for-a-crime-lord house on an average-size lot on an ordinary cul-de-sac in the nothing-special middle-class town of Massapequa, New York, off Sunrise Highway, a few miles east of Jones Beach Parkway. Every day he was driven from his modest home to his modest office in a nondescript brick building on Ocean Parkway in South Brooklyn, in a car no Caddy- or Lincoln-loving wiseguy would be caught dead in—a fucking Oldsmobile.

If you happened to see Gambino on the street, you’d never give him a second look. His only distinguishing features were his bent beak nose and the little porkpie hat and enigmatic Mona Lisa smile he always wore. Joe Bonanno wrote that Gambino was a squirrel of a man, a servile and cringing individual.¹ Of course he waited until Gambino was already safely tucked away in his grave before he said it out loud in a book.

For a penniless illegal immigrant who washed ashore in 1921 at age nineteen, Gambino did all right for himself. By 1972 he commanded an army of four thousand made men and associates; he ran a business enterprise whose holdings rivaled those of any modern-day hedge fund; his earnings from the waterfront shipping, air freight, trucking, construction, garment, and waste disposal industries and the unions under his control rivaled the enormous cash flow funneled to him by the twenty-four capos who ran the Gambino Family’s gambling, loan-sharking, and extortion operations, and whose street crews carried out the robberies, inflicted the beatings, and committed the murders and other crimes that made headlines. But thanks to the protection provided by public servants, little if any punishment resulted for the perps.

The Gambino criminal enterprise that became more profitable than all the rest was narcotics. Despite what Brando’s Don Corleone said about the drug trade being too dirty a business for bosses who ran their Families by strict codes of honor and respect, the real godfather started importing heroin into the United States by the freighter load in 1948; that’s when he and Lucky Luciano established the Turkey-to-Sicily-to-Marseilles-to-New-York smuggling operation known as the French Connection.

Throughout the following decade, demand for hard drugs was pretty much limited to lowlifes, bohemians, and ghetto-crushed blacks. That changed in the 1960s when the Vietnam War created a mass market for the stuff. By 1972, more than fifty-five thousand American kids had been killed, a quarter of a million wounded, and countless survivors had been so severely traumatized that they were happy to pay $100 for a gram of smack to kill the pain.

The Mob hadn’t seen a cash cow like it since 1933 when Prohibition ended. Booze was a golden fountain of cash and goodwill. It was the ultimate crime, the perfect illegal business. The product was a magic elixir that everybody wanted. There was no top to the demand; the Mob controlled the entire supply, paid off the cops to reduce the risk, and kept all the profits. Plus, everybody—the legitimate public, their elected officials, and even the cops—loved bootleggers because they kept the beer taps flowing and their liquor cabinets full.

Prohibition was the golden goose that made the Mob. Narcotics was the poison that killed it. Legitimate slobs wanted no part of soul-killers like heroin. You never saw Bogart or Cagney or Edward G. make a movie about the glamorous life of drug traffickers. Pushers were the worst kind of scum, and they brought the worst kind of heat—the kind that couldn’t be bought. That’s why Gambino and the rest of the dons distributed the product from the French Connection pipeline through surrogate non-Mafia gangs—and why they kept their involvement in trafficking a secret from all but the very top echelon of their own Families.

The bosses never shared their profits with the guys in the bottom tiers of the Family hierarchy. The Mob was a trickle-up organization; all cash flowed up from the street crews to the capos and from there to the top guys and, finally, to the boss, never the other way around. The Mob’s CEOs figured that the less the rank and file knew about the wealth that was not trickling down to them, the better.

In 1956, Congress passed legislation establishing mandatory sentences of twenty years in prison, with no chance of parole, for anyone convicted of selling narcotics. That’s when the bosses got panicky. They realized that when faced with the prospect of spending a third of their adult lifetime in the paint, even their most loyal soldiers would forget their vows of silence—omertà—and turn rat on their Fathers.

The next year, the Commission, the national crime organization’s board of directors, called an emergency meeting of Mob leaders from across the country to discuss the new drug-sentencing law. They held the big sit-down in the town of Apalachin, New York, near Binghamton. Carlo Gambino, the Commission’s newest member thanks to his whacking of his own godfather, Albert Anastasia, in a celebrated hit a few weeks before, proposed a simple solution to the problems posed by the feds’ new narcotics laws: capital punishment—Mob style.

This meant that any made member of a Family caught dealing drugs would be executed by lethal injection—he’d get a bullet right in the coconut.

At the time of the Apalachin conference, narcotics weren’t even on the average Mob soldier’s radar. But fifteen years later they were—and big time. I know because that’s when I got into the babania trade myself. And as soon as I went all in, the government upped the ante. The Dangerous Drug Acts of 1972 included mandatory sentencing provisions that meant if I got caught dealing just four ounces of the stuff—a fraction of the kilos we were moving—I’d be looking at twenty-five years to life in prison.

When that happened, Carlo Gambino, who by then was the most powerful don on the Commission, countered with a mandatory sentencing act of his own: From now on, he decreed, not only made guys but anybody even vaguely associated with any Mob Family who dealt the smack got the whack. (The dons themselves as well as top lieutenants involved in the godfathers’ own huge drug-importing business were of course excluded.)

On top of that, Gambino announced a new Mafia Code of Honor: It was the responsibility of middle management—Family captains and crew chiefs—to locate and confront any and all drug-dealing underlings and act accordingly. Failure to do so meant the violator’s superior faced the same mandatory sentence—execution without trial. Thanks to the diminutive Don Carlo’s brilliant use of force and persuasion, Gambino not only ran the Commission and the Mob’s entire national organization; he was, by the time our story begins, the de facto boss of all the other New York Families except one—my own, the Colombos.

By means of marriage (Lucchese), muscle (Bonanno), and morte (Genovese), Gambino had installed puppet bosses beholden to him in each of those three Families. The fourth Family, the Colombos, formerly run by my uncle Tony’s old don, Joe Profaci, and torn apart by a bloody civil war fought between a rebel faction led by the Gallo brothers and family loyalists led by Carmine the Snake Persico, had caused terrible problems for Gambino and the entire New York Mob for more than a decade.

Gambino thought he had solved them and ended the so-called Gallo Wars by installing Joe Colombo in 1965. But even after Larry Gallo’s death and his brother Joe’s imprisonment, the bloodshed continued intermittently until 1969, when two friends of my boss Dominic were rubbed out in what everybody thought was the war’s final skirmish.

But then, in the spring of 1971, Crazy Joe Gallo came home from prison, and that’s when tensions began to build until it looked like there was going to be all-out war all over again.

There were other forces at work in 1972 that made Gambino’s position of wealth and power—and that of the Mob itself—not quite as unassailable as it seemed. The whole country was about to go through major convulsions that nobody foresaw when a crew of bungling burglars blew the Watergate break-in that June. For the Mob, the seemingly unrelated event that caused a catastrophe happened a month before the fiasco at the Watergate, in May 1972, when J. Edgar Hoover croaked.

People can be forgiven for assuming that the death of the famous G-man who had run the FBI for the past half century would have caused rejoicing in the Families. But the truth was that J. Edgar Hoover, the Justice Department’s chief crime fighter, was the best friend the Mafia ever had. Hoover’s ties to the Mob went back decades, and that was the main reason why the Families prospered the way they did for so long without the feds doing squat about it. The nation’s top cop was closely associated with two of the Mob’s most prominent players: Frank Costello, who used his knowledge of Hoover’s secret gambling addiction and his closeted life as a homosexual to intimidate and control him; and Roy Cohn, the infamous Mob lawyer who helped Hoover wage war on Communists and the Left instead of on Cohn’s clients, who were a far more real danger to the republic than any civil rights leader or peace demonstrator ever was.

Throughout the decades he ran the bureau, Hoover insisted publicly that the Mafia was a bugaboo that didn’t exist. Privately, when his agents presented him with solid proof that it not only existed but in fact was the engine that drove 99 percent of organized criminal activity in the United States, he suppressed the reports and shitcanned the agents who filed them.

Instead of going after the Mob and its honchos, Hoover chased headlines and the bank robbers and kidnappers and mad bombers who made them. Those were the bad guys Hoover put on his famous Ten Most Wanted lists—never the mobsters who committed more serial killings and torture murders and stole more money and abused the laws of the land far more brazenly than lone gun freelancers like John Dillinger and Machine Gun Kelly possibly could.

When the Kennedy brothers got in office and ordered Hoover to go after the Mob, the FBI finally turned up the heat. But Hoover’s brief and belated war on the Mafia ended with one genius hit in Dallas. And when J. Edgar led the Warren Commission investigation into the Kennedy assassination, he suppressed all evidence that pointed to the true culprits behind the plot.

Before he died on May 2, 1972, Hoover performed one last service for the Mafia. He instructed Roy Cohn to deliver a deathbed warning to Cohn’s client Carlo Gambino. There was, Cohn told the godfather immediately after Hoover’s demise, a rat in the Gambino Family’s largest crew. An unnamed source inside Charlie Fatico’s Bergin Hunt and Fish Club had been feeding information directly to Hoover since 1966. As long as J. Edgar was on the job, the top secret director’s-eyes-only reports filed by the rat’s contact agent were placed where they could do no harm—in Hoover’s office shredder. The FBI’s new director was sure to see to it that the Bergin spy ratted in vain no longer—which meant serious trouble ahead for Don Carlo Gambino, his Family’s entire organization, and the New York Mob itself.

There was something more about the death of the Mob’s Great Protector that must have kept the lights burning late in Massapequa. The year before Hoover died, Congress passed a law specifically calibrated to destroy the Mafia. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was diabolically simple: It basically made it a crime to run a Mob Family. Carlo Gambino recognized that the RICO Act was more than a sick joke—the lawyer who came up with it named it after Rico Bandello, every Mob guy’s favorite movie gangster played by Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar. Gambino knew that RICO meant it was open season on the Mob, and without Hoover’s shield to protect him the government would finally go after the country’s real public enemy number 1—Don Carlo Gambino himself.

With threats looming all around—from government regulators on the outside and from his own wiseguys within—Gambino purged the ranks of deadwood, dealers, and traitors. He also began to lay the groundwork for a total reorganization of the Mob’s Family structure. The first step was to find new blood to replace the old. To do so he spread the word that he would soon reopen his Family’s membership rolls to proven young men who would take the place of its aged or eliminated made members.

But pinning buttons on worthy new soldiers was easier said than done. The sad fact was that the talent pool was running dry. The city that once teemed with native and first-generation Italians had turned into a melting pot full of mutts. Gambino could still find guys who were 100 percent Italian but few who were steeped in the traditions of the ancient secret societies of Sicily or the old-school Family values of their Americanized offspring, the New York Mob.

One who did honor the old customs and traditions and who eventually caught Gambino’s eye was my friend Johnny Boy Gotti.

I was always a street guy. I was into robbing and stealing and gambling and loan sharking. I wasn’t involved in the big-money sit-downs, the labor racketeering and construction company shakedowns, the Garment District and garbage and cement company kickbacks. As for the Mob’s control of the Teamsters, all I did was hijack the trucks.

For guys like me and Fox, my blood brother and crime partner, the thing we loved about being in that life was the action, the excitement. All we wanted was the chance to pull robberies, heists, and hijackings. We were in it for the money, sure. But it was the danger, the thrills that made the life of crime something special. Talk about a rush? Forget about it. There’s no rush like pulling a robbery. It’s like sex. I couldn’t get enough.

A guy like John Gotti was different. He was far more ambitious than me and Fox. He wasn’t in it just for the rush and the riches. He wanted the power and the glory.

John Gotti’s tragedy, if you can call it that, was that he was born too late for the old-school gangster crown that he craved. He began his rise as the Mob was beginning to crumble; by the time he got to the top, the bottom had dropped out.

From the beginning, John was charismatic and smart. He just wasn’t cut out to be godfather. Once he became boss, he drove the bus right off the bridge. Or maybe it was the bus that drove him. Either way, I watched him go.

Here’s how it all happened.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

A Star Is Born

JANUARY 1972

HE MADE HIS ENTRANCE on a frigid night about three weeks after New Year’s. He was dressed like a street guy in a leather jacket, but he walked and talked like a king. And he got treated like one. Even my boss, Little Dom Cataldo, showed him respect that first night. Wait ’til you meet this guy, my new friend Foxy Jerothe had told me. Johnny’s a real gangster.

I hadn’t seen John Gotti since that summer in the Flame. He was thirty-one now, but he still wore his hair swept back ’50s style like most of us did back then. He had thick sideburns, and his widow’s peak was more pronounced that it had been in ’68; it looked like he was combing it into a fall in front like Dion, but that might just have been the way his hair grew.

I remembered he looked like a linebacker when I saw him three years before, but now he was bulked up from pumping prison iron and was built more powerful, like a nose guard or a tackle; he had a barrel chest with massive shoulders and thick arms, kind of like Rocky Marciano, only better looking.

He didn’t need the expensive silk suits and the Chesterfield coats he took to wearing later to make an impression. He walked into the club like there was a force field around him; he had that kind of charisma, a presence that commanded instant respect. It was strange. You could tell by looking at him that he didn’t have two nickels to rub together, but guys were drawn to him. He had a kind of body language, a swagger that everybody liked.

It was like Fox said: He was a gangster’s gangster.

Johnny was barely out of the cuffs and leg chains when he arrived. He’d been bused in from Lewisburg, the federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania, and processed out at the West Street lockup that afternoon. Before he went home to see his wife and kids, he checked in with his Gambino Family boss at the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club, about ten blocks away from our joint on Atlantic Avenue in Ozone Park. The Bergin was the new headquarters of Charlie Fatico, boss of the largest and strongest crews in Don Carlo Gambino’s entire organization. Charlie had a couple hundred soldiers under him; he was number three in the Family behind Neil Dellacroce, Don Carlo’s underboss and heir apparent who worked out of the Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy.

After his welcome home sit-down with Charlie, Gotti went to spend some time with his other family, his wife, Victoria, and their five children. Itching for some action after three years in the cement, John got one of his guys to pick him up and bring him over to the Sinatra Club, where his crew from the Bergin—along with made guys and associate members of Dom and my Colombo Family and even some Luccheses from Paul Vario’s crew in Brooklyn—were gathered to greet him.

All five of the Families that made up the New York Mob were as touchy about their turf as Indian tribes in the Old West. Guys from different Families didn’t work together without permission from their bosses, and as a rule they didn’t hang out at each other’s social clubs. The exceptions were the floating craps and card games that most of the bosses ran on certain nights of the week that were open to all connected guys.

Because the Sinatra Club was a gambling joint owned and run by Colombos in a part of Queens where the Gambinos and Luccheses also operated, Dom had to get permission to open from the bosses. Before a hand was dealt, he had sit-downs with Pegleg Brancato, who was acting boss of our Family, Paulie Vario, and Charlie Fatico. All three gave their blessing, though Charlie made sure that we wouldn’t open on Fridays and compete with his weekly craps game.

The Bergin guys were regulars from the first night we opened two months before. We had a tight connection with Fatico and his brother, Danny, because Dom and my mouthpiece, Mike Coiro, represented them and a bunch of their guys, including John Gotti and his brother Genie.

Mike was there that night, and he was one of the first guys Johnny embraced when he arrived—I would have hugged the Mouthpiece too if he’d done for me what he did for Johnny. Gotti had been looking at more than twenty years for three hijackings and a kidnap count for making off with one truck with the driver still in it. Mike had magic connections in the Queens courthouse, where he got one of John’s cases dismissed outright; a federal judge threw out the second case after Mike pointed out that the FBI used illegal wiretaps; and in the one case John ended up doing time for, Mike got the sentence knocked down from eight years to thirty months.

Then John lucked out again. Instead of getting sent to Atlanta or some other hard-core federal pen, he got assigned to Lewisburg, which was run like the courthouse in Queens—the Mob owned everybody from the warden to the prison priest. John made the best of his time at Lewisburg just like I would later; he ate steaks, drank scotch, and pumped iron; he also made connections on the prison’s Mafia-only cellblock with some very top guys like Carmine Galante, the boss of the Bonanno Family, and Jimmy Hoffa, the Mobbed-up Teamsters boss who knew every major Mob leader in the country. John came out of prison like a roughneck prince; glory awaited once he got some grooming … and if he could survive the deadly leadership tests that lay ahead.

Mike the Mouthpiece got a lot of congratulatory slaps on the back that night from Johnny’s guys, and he loved every minute of it. Mike was a very sharp—and sharp-looking—lawyer. He was tall and lean, with dark wavy hair. He looked like the actor Jerry Orbach. He always had a big smile and an infectious personality. He was a married, middle-aged attorney, but he’d been representing gangsters so long he thought he was one himself. He loved gambling, strong scotch, and forbidden pussy, all of which he found at the Sinatra Club, where he was a regular even on nights when we weren’t throwing a welcome home party for one of his clients.

Another guy John greeted like a long-lost brother was Foxy, the young Gambino who’d been coming to the club since the night we opened and who’d become my crime partner. The Fox idolized Gotti; he couldn’t stop talking about him. The whole time I knew Fox, I never heard him say a word against John Gotti. I really think he thought of him as godlike. Fox and John both grew up on the same streets in East New York where my grandfather owned a bar and where my family lived when I was born. Fox was a fatherless sixteen-year-old high school dropout running with John’s old street gang, the Rockaway Boys, when John was in his mid-twenties and starting out with Fatico’s crew, which operated out of Albert Anastasia’s old East New York headquarters, the Club, in those days.

John must have seen something of himself in Fox because he took the kid under his wing and showed him the ropes. He had Fox play the outfield for him on jobs, working as lookout and helping out at Charlie Fatico’s drop unloading swag off trucks that John and his crew jacked. John loved Fox like a kid brother, and Fox would do anything for him, including kill, which he vowed he’d do in a heartbeat even though it wouldn’t get him his button. Fox couldn’t be a made guy because he was a mutt—half Italian, part Irish, and part whatever.

Even though he could never be a full-fledged mafioso, Fox was a valued member of the Bergin crew; he had already got his bump up and was pulling action scores by the time we met and started working together.

Soon after Gotti’s homecoming, Fox and I would be teamed with another Sinatra Club regular to form the New York Mob’s first Three-Families hijacking crew.

The third man was Tommy Two Guns DeSimone, the Lucchese Family killer who would become famous twenty years later when Joe Pesci played a character based on him in Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas.

Tommy was from my neighborhood in Ozone Park; he went to high school with my wife, Angela, and I’d known him to say hello to for years. In GoodFellas, Pesci got Tommy’s weird, almost schizo personality dead on, but not his look. Tommy was tall and trim and a really handsome guy—he looked like Errol Flynn. He was one of the few connected guys I ever knew with a mustache. I don’t know how he carried it off—or why his own boss, Paul Vario, didn’t make him shave it—but it worked for him.

Tommy had ADD and ADHD; whatever other deficit disorder you can think of, he had it. Put that together with a guy who liked to drink and snort coke, had a violent, hair-trigger temper, and never left home without at least two guns in his belt, and you hoped you weren’t around when he flew into one of his rages.

Part of Tommy’s problem was that he had a large-size chip on his shoulder. He came from a long line of mobsters: His grandfather and uncle were both bosses in the Los Angeles Family, and two of his older brothers were connected to the Gambinos in New York; one was a rat who got whacked for it. Having a rat in the family made Tommy very eager to prove himself.

Most of the time he was a blast to be around. He was funny as hell and was always up for wild times. He had an upbeat personality but with a real downside; he’d be smiling and laughing one second, and he’d pull the trigger the next.

Once Fox and I teamed up with Tommy, the three of us became pretty good friends. But from the beginning there were underlying tensions between Tommy and Fox, who was with the Gambinos, the Family Tommy’s brother ratted on. But their differences were personal and went deeper and, just like the vendettas that tore apart the ancient secret societies of Sicily, their feud would start over a woman.

Two gorillas paying homage to John Gotti that night at the Sinatra Club were his right-hand man and best friend since they were kids, Angelo Ruggiero and Willie Boy Johnson, another Rockaways graduate who started out with Fatico at the same time John did.

Between the two of them, Fat Angelo and Willie Boy outweighed King Kong. Ange was a 280-pound behemoth with a pudgy face and a permanent scowl that made him look like a big lethal baby. He had a face that would scare the rattles off a snake.

Ange also had a nasty temper and he was a brutal killer, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t fun to be around. He was funny as hell and had all kinds of weird mannerisms. I always got a kick out of him and so did a lot of guys. They called him Quack because he was pigeon-toed and walked like a duck. Years later they called him that for reasons that weren’t so funny.

Ange had a lot going for him. Besides riding John Gotti’s rising star, he had a connection at the very top of the Gambino hierarchy—his uncle was Neil Dellacroce, second in command under Carlo Gambino and presumed to be the Family’s next godfather. Ange also had another blood relative who was going places. His brother Sal, who got pinched with Johnny Boy back in 1963 for stealing an Avis rental car, would soon become one of the wealthiest gangsters in New York City.

Gorilla number two had even more muscle than Angelo but none of his connections. Willie Boy Johnson was six feet and 250 pounds of bad trouble. You could tell by looking at his hands. He had the words love and hate tattooed on his knuckles, like Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter. Willie Boy’s tats looked like jailhouse handiwork performed by a drunk who did the carving with a broken liquor bottle.

Willie Boy was five years older than Johnny Boy, ten years older than me; he came up doing freelance muscle work for Fatico back when Anastasia was still boss. He’d been a loyal Gambino soldier ever since, but, like Fox, he could never become a made member of the Family. Willie Boy was only half Italian. His father was an ironworker who built skyscrapers; he was also a real native New Yorker—a full-blooded Mohawk Indian. His people were living in this country before Columbus became the first Italian to come over on a boat.

Willie Boy’s real name was Wilfred or some shit like that. Guys called him Half-Breed behind his back. If they were smart, they called him Mr. Johnson to his face.

Willie Boy didn’t seem to have a nerve ending in his body. When he was playing cards, he sat still as a rock. That’s why guys figured he had the brains of one. But Willie Boy had a lot more going on than anyone knew.

Another one of Johnny’s friends from the old neighborhood, John Carneglia, was there to greet him that night. John and his younger brother Charles came up stealing cars for Charlie Fatico. In later years they would make their own fortune in the hot-car business. Brother John would make his bones as a button man, one of the top hitters in the Family. Charles would do his own fair share of killings, but his skill at vanishing bodies in tubs of acid so there was no earthly trace left of the victims made him the go-to guy after a whacking for all the crews in the Gambino Family.

Every thug in the club used a baseball bat at one time or another to bust a deadbeat’s skull or kneecaps—or balls. But Tony Roach, Johnny Boy’s driver, was the only one who could crush a softball two city blocks like he did every year at Charlie Fatico’s Fourth of July barbeque and fireworks picnic. Tony was a gifted athlete, but that’s not what you’d think if you ran into him in a dark alley—or even a brightly lit one. Tony was scarier than your worst dream of what a hit man looks like. He was a tall and skinny Frankenstein’s monster. He didn’t stand; he hulked. He had sunken cheeks and sunken eyes, and his skin was scarred from chicken pox or some shit he had when he was a kid. His head looked like a skull; he looked like the walking dead.